Check out July’s snapshots highlighting how we put Human Understanding into practice.

What Healthcare and Parents Can Learn from a Powerful Disney World Experience

NRC Health’s Ryan Donohue has a vivid analogy about managing expectations that applies to healthcare leaders and parenting, which he shared during a recent webinar, “Pandemic Parents: A Portrait of Shifting Priorities in Raising Kids.”

“You know that children can be ruthless in their expectations, and if you don’t fulfill them, you can have a real confrontation on your hands,” he says. “But it’s interesting to think about this perspective, not just in healthcare but in other industries. And one of my favorites to examine is the Magic Kingdom.”

Donohue shares that he had not visited Disney World as a child. Still, as a parent, he was excited to take his kids. While the family was gathered around the Christmas tree, he and his wife announced to the kids that the family would take a trip there in June. “To see their eyes light up—they were so excited!” he recalls.

But inevitably, a rookie parenting mistake happened. Find out what Space Mountain has in common with parental trends affecting healthcare, and what leaders can learn from Disney about making every touchpoint with customers count, in this insightful blog article.

Symposium Breakout Sessions Offer Encouragement through Empowering Stories from Compelling Speakers

Check out our list of motivating messages from esteemed leaders in the 28^th NRC Health Symposium’s innovative breakout sessions:

• “Connect and Transparency: Programs Used Together to Enhance Communication for Patients” with Kathy Denton, Ph.D., CPHQ, SSBB, CPXP, Director of Patient Experience, MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Janice Finder, RN, MSN, Executive Director, University of Texas MD Anderson
• “Learning How to Own It: Designing a Service-recovery System” Katie Lamoreux, Program Manager, MHA, Sanford Health
• “Recognition Is the Path to Resilience” Nick DeStefano, Service Excellence Process Manager, MS—Organizational Management, McLeod Health
• “From the Front Lines of Primary Care: How to Establish a Practical Patient Experience Program” with Jason Ruda, Experience Director, MS, CPXP, Tandigm Health
• “Building Patient Confidence and Trust Through Collaboration” with Julia Cox-Pearson, BSN, MBB, Director of Lean and Patient Experience, Wellstar
• “From a Child’s Perspective….” Why Do We Have Doctors if We Have Nurses?” How Positive Nurse/Patient Relationships Support Quality Outcomes and Patient Experience” with Julie Pina, Chief Nursing Officer, Driscoll Children’s Hospital, and Evelyn Ferrer, MPA, PgC-HCAD, Patient Relations Director, Driscoll Children’s Hospital
• “Developing a Proactive Service Recovery Model to Reduce Hospital Complaints & Grievances” with Kevin Phipps, MBA, Director, Patient Experience, Wellstar Atlanta Medical Center
• “Nurse-leader Rounding: Strategies that Work! with Pamela Collins, MSN, MEDSURG-BC, CMSRN, NPD-BC, Enterprise Service Line Educator, Corporate Patient Experience, Atrium Health

We can’t wait to see you in Seattle!
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Power in the Pause: Don Collard Teaches How to Replenish and Refocus for Improved Outcomes

NRC Health’s Patient No Longer podcast is in search of what’s new, what’s next, and what will make healthcare human again. The latest episode, “Exploring Replenishment in the Era of Burnout, Resignation, and Resilience,” featuring Dan Collard, co-founder and partner of Healthcare Plus Solutions Group, discusses the idea of healthcare replenishment and the best questions senior executives should ask leaders for improved employee and patient satisfaction.

“As we’ve looked back a little bit, what bothers most clinicians about the term resiliency, or being asked to be resilient, is that it really means you must just keep going,” Collard says. “With resiliency, there’s no pause. But there’s real power in the pause. There’s real power in taking that breath as we lead a vibrant conversation about well-being, stress, and trauma. Because we think a lot of what the industry has gone through is not necessarily stress, but trauma. We’ve really happened upon this whole notion of the concept of “You can’t give what you don’t have.”

Collard advises that instead of just focusing on being resilient, leaders should develop deliberate, well-designed exercises to replenish themselves and others—because burned-out leaders have burned-out staff. He emphasizes that thinking this way gets us back to the original reason most of us got into healthcare in the first place: to provide better patient care.

Learn more about why it’s so important that an organization’s mission, vision, and values aren’t just plaques on the walls in this episode of Patient No Longer.

The Importance of Finding Your Own Joy First as a Nurse to Improve Patient Care

We know that communication, respect, empathy, organization, and lifelong learning are crucial functions of nursing—but what about the ability to find your own joy?

Jill Ellis, Solutions Expert, Magnet and Nursing Leadership, recently addressed this topic in a webinar that offered insights on helping nurses survive in an ever-changing nursing world. With 40 years of nursing to her credit, Ellis’s insights are powerfully astute.

“Finding your own joy means replenishing yourself, recharging your battery, thinking about yourself as a nurse,” she advises. “It’s about taking a few minutes to reconnect with yourself, taking some time in the breathing—in through the nose, out through the mouth—closing your eyes and centering yourself, and being mindful.”

Ellis believes that joy is internal and inside of us all. She says that as nurses, we must find a way to rekindle the joy and bring that passion and fire back to give personalized nursing to each patient we serve.

Can embracing kindness improve overall measures? Register to watch the webinar on demand.

Experience and Marketing and IT, Oh My! Patient No Longer Podcast Explores the Power of Technology to Enable Healthcare Connection

Chris DuFresne, Vice President of Experience and Marketing Operations for Allina Health in Minneapolis, shares his thoughts with host Ryan Donohue on NRC Health’s Patient No Longer podcast about how technology better connects us to patients

DuFresne says that Allina, like many healthcare organizations, wrestles with determining the best way to measure the virtual-and-physical hybrid approach to healthcare experiences. In doing so, they have moved from traditional CSAT to NPS in order to benchmark better with other industries.

DuFresne admits that there’s a whole host of measures to consider. “Digitally, we can measure how many people bounced out of the online scheduling flow. But you can’t always know why,” he says. “It all comes down to measuring how somebody feels—feelings are hard to measure. So it doesn’t mean we can’t keep trying, but we’re not going to find the holy-grail metric, as you can with operating margin or net revenue in the healthcare world. It’s going to continue to be squishy.”

Discover how Allina Health measures the patient experience, and how a CRM integration may unlock better personalization, in this episode of Patient No Longer